Longshoremen on strike in New Jersey and New York over produce work

Longshoremen were on strike Wednesday at ports in New Jersey and New York in defiance of a judge’s order, leaving at least a dozen ships waiting to off-load cargo containers for a second day and forcing truckers to cool their heels or return shipments to their senders.

The work stoppage stems from a dispute between the International Longshoremen’s Association and Del Monte Fresh Products over the company’s decision to relocate from a terminal in Camden to one in Gloucester City in southern New Jersey.

"I’ve been sitting here since yesterday morning," said Bobby Noyes from the cab of a truck hauling more than 30,000 pounds of Hershey’s chocolate to Port Newark for shipment to Seoul, South Korea.

"I’m ready to turn around — if I’m going to go broke, it’s cheaper to go broke at home," Noyes said just before putting the truck in gear and heading back to Hershey. Noyes said he won’t get paid unless the delivery is completed.

Longshoremen say Del Monte is trying to undercut the union by first cutting pay and then moving the jobs, but the company insists the new terminal is fully unionized.

"They’re taking family-sustaining jobs with health insurance and they’re turning them into garbage," said ILA member Charlie Mahoney, who traveled from Philadelphia to protest in Brooklyn, where his red Phillies cap stood out. "If it happened to us, it can happen here."

Philadelphia ILA members tossed pineapples into the Delaware River in protest on Labor Day.

"We’re worried that it’ll be like a cancer," said Anthony Velardo, a union member at Port Newark who operates machinery that takes the containers off the ships and loads them into waiting trucks. "It’ll start small and then grow, and what happened in Philly can happen here and all our jobs could go somewhere else."

Dionysios Christou, a spokesman for Coral Gables, Fla.-based Del Monte Fresh Produce’s, said the union is misrepresenting the company’s reason for switching ports and says that $10 million worth of perishable cargo is at risk because of the work stoppage.

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"This action is causing deep economic harm to many innocent parties. Losses being experienced by the ocean carriers alone who have ships idled in the harbor are totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars a day."

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